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Monday, 07 March 2016

Toilets, for example. Nowhere is open defecation more prominent than in India, where more than 600 million people have no access to a toilet. But even where proper sanitation has been installed, “people tend not to want to use latrines,” says Gauri. It is a difficult habit to break, exacerbated by issues such as India’s caste system.

The team at Gini will be helping the Indian government work out how to meet its target to eliminate open defecation by 2019, measuring the success of certain interventions, such as asking people to commit to using toilets, and “no toilet, no bride” – an initiative that asks parents to ensure their daughters are not married to men whose villages have no toilet.

It's a similar result (although a better intervention) to the work we did with IRC and BRAC in Bangladesh back in 2012/2013 - and credit to the teams at both BRAC and WorldBank for their emergent approach to look at what does influence behaviour, rather than just what they thought influenced behaviour.

Back in 2012, we were planning the SenseMaker® project which was going to collect people's broad experiences about hygiene and latrines into a signification framework that allows us to explore quantitative patterns underpinned with qualitative material. As we built the framework, there was one piece of specific academic literature we built into the framework - the research that said (I'm paraphrasing) "you sell latrines to people by emphasising that they reduce risk, illness and disgust". So that was designed in - a clear hypothesis up front that we put into the framework.

A couple of months later, the remarkable BRAC team had gathered over 500 experiences into the framework and a group of us had gathered to make sense of the results in the Hague - project managers, subject matter experts, BRAC team members, experts on Bangladesh and myself (the naïve one). The team made clear that they needed to know how to make installation, use and maintenance of hygienic latrines desirable to people in rural communities on their terms. The expectation was that one of the three core messages would work more strongly with particular groups than the others - so should we be emphasising the risk, the disgust or the illness message?

From the signification data - the patterns that we could statistically analyse without ever looking at the stories themselves - it was clear that the answer was "None of the above". There was, it has to be said, a palpable sense of disappointment in the room, mingled with confusion - "well what does work then, if it's not what the academics said would"

At this point, the stories came into their own - we identified a cluster of stories in which people did regard a latrine as being desirable, as being valuable. And then we asked the team back in Dhaka to translate those stories overnight and send them back to us the next morning.

Nineteen stories in all - and as we read them, already knowing that they illustrated desirable examples in which latrines played a role, a theme emerged quite quickly:

Installing a hygienic latrine gives you a better chance of a good quality marriage

It's one of those glorious conclusions that makes complete sense in retrospect but that it came out of the data and the words of people in the field gave it a validity that we couldn't have got elsewhere.

Even better - we had similarly themed examples told by different age groups:

For young men, there was the story of the man who got married, his new wife moved to the new house and discovered there was no latrine. Two weeks later, on going to visit his new in-laws, he was subjected to two hours of nagging from his mother-in-law about how her daughter deserved a house with a latrine and how disrespectful she thought he was being.

For parents of young children, there were other specific examples

We changed the direction of the communications programme as a result, and equipped field officers with specific, easily-recalled examples of stories to tell in the villages.

Like I said, the WorldBank idea of asking parents to ensure their daughters are not married to men whose villages have no toilet is even better. But brilliant all the same - recognising that behavioural change and nudging means looking at how people live their lives and where they are pre-disposed to do something - and then creating interventions based on that. It's a more ethical, more effective way of helping populations - by allowing them an authentic voice first, then helping policy- and decision-makers (and in most cases, people from the communities themselves) amplify the positive behaviours themselves.

And, just for good measure, here's an example of one of the stories, translated from the original Bangla, that helped us to reach our conclusion:

Lots of families in Keutgao village did not have latrines. Many of the girls from the families living in this village were of appropriate age for marriage, and therefore were receiving proposals from nearby villages. There was such a case where a man and his family from a nearby village came over to this village to meet a girl who was a prospective match for him. After some conversation and dinner, one of the guests asked to use the latrine. The girl’s father showed him the way to some bushes and informed him that they all use the bushes as a toilet. The man’s family then left the girl’s house and informed her family that they would not be able to form a new relationship with a family that did not have a latrine. Seeing how the lack of a latrine prevented their daughter from being able to get married, the family decided to install a proper, sanitary latrine in their home. Eventually, the family gained social acceptance and the girl got married. Not only did this family acquire a latrine of their own, but they inspired others to do the same as well.

Monday, 08 February 2016

There's more to come on the results of the recent Fragments of Impact event in Istanbul - the current plan is to write the projects up properly as soon as we can a) find people who can write effectively on this topic or b) find the time ourselves to sit and write. (Volunteers welcome...)

But. On Friday I got an email from one participant who had headed straight from the third day of the workshop, when we were working on how to develop conclusions with multiple stakeholder groups and build interventions, to Ecuador to work with the people involved in one of his projects. Tom van Steen of VECO emailed last week:

On our behalf, I am happy to share with you that we have conducted a first joint analysis workshop (as simulated on the third day of our gathering) with our team in Ecuador. Despite some initial resistance to the completely novel workshop methodologies, participants (young farmer leaders, NGOs, government (national+local), private sector and VECO staff, 25 in total) left rather thrilled and with lots of energy to keep the work going.

Our local teams also know how to use the software for analysis of the data and will continue collecting some more stories to have a more complete dataset, which will then be the basis for a more fully fledged analysis workshop.

A blogpost is in the making and will be shared as soon as ready!

Fantastic news - although, knowing the VECO team Tom and Steff, it's hardly a surprise! They are, after all, the team that pulled together the recent SenseMaker® practitioners' knowledge exchange in Leuven, Belgium - a report here. And watch their blog for that post.

And at the end of the three days in Istanbul, I forgot to do one all-important thing. To thank all the people who'd made it happen:

the many individuals in country who worked so hard to collect materials;

Milica Begovic and Khatuna Sandroshvilli at UNDP who mentored people and supported the programme from their respective offices in Istanbul and Tbilisi;

Richard Hare for the technical know-how and patience to build around 20 different SenseMaker® collection websites and apps, most in languages that made no sense to him;

Anna Hanchar and Meg Odling-Smee for coordinating and supporting country teams with every element - a tough task given how many different moving parts there were.

Thursday, 28 January 2016

Back in June 2015, we began the Fragments of Impact programme, partnering with UNDP, to explore how to use SenseMaker® in monitoring and evaluation. This week we’re back in Istanbul, with all the various participants to teach and explore the data and what to do next - in terms of interventions, in terms of monitoring and in terms of advocacy.

The programme, open to any NGO organisation, was joined by UNDP teams, the International Labour Organisation (ILO), VECO and UNICEF. (Next time, I hope we’ll see more smaller NGOs joining, but one step at a time.) At our initial June event in Istanbul, we spent a couple of days going through the theoretical underpinnings of why we need to do different things in complex situations, what would be more useful to decision-makers and implementers and what are the necessary elements of running SenseMaker® projects. Working with all the different groups and agendas, we identified three core subjects for research - security and stabilisation; business networks and innovation; youth, poverty and unemployment. And ten different countries that we would be running these in. Exciting stuff.

Immediately after the kickoff, a number of things started to happen:

At the office, Anna and I took all the material that people had given us to come up with the core signification frameworks - one for each of the research subjects. We built multiple choice questions for common demographics across countries; triads for common concepts and modulators; dyads and stones. The challenge wasn’t small - we were trying to build frameworks that gave everyone 80-90% of their ideal, recognising that for anyone to have their perfect framework wasn’t in the scope of the Fragments of Impact programme. (That would have taken a different approach - individually-commissioned projects).

In Istanbul our UNDP partners Millie and Khatuna started to coordinate with all the various organisations and teams to ensure everyone would get the information and help they needed in the coming months as they ran their collection projects.

In the countries, the teams started to pull together their plans for collecting micro-narratives and stories - some through people already in the field, others through partner organisations.

By September, things were moving - different paces in different places, but moving all the same.

The frameworks were debated and discussed - Anna and I hadn’t quite managed to encapsulate everything, so we decided to build a fourth framework - valuechain exploration. And some countries needed specific extra questions - which brought in the biggest challenge: coordinating frameworks, websites and apps, as Richard Hare, designer extraordinaire, stepped in to start building sites. In fairness, we’d underestimated the time and effort this would take - a useful lesson for next time.

Once the frameworks were finalised, country teams translated the research instruments into whatever languages were necessary - Arabic, Russian, Serb, Bemba, Romanian, Turkish. And the websites were built to match.

Meanwhile, some countries were already starting on collection - in Yemen, paper data was collected in seriously difficult environments. The project lead was cycling to the office at one point, and had to scramble for cover as drones and bombs put in an appearance. Despite all this, they rapidly gathered over 1,000 micro-narratives.

As websites were completed and signed off, collection kicked in big time. Android tablets, iPhones and websites were used to collect directly from people wherever possible. (For Yemen, those papers needed to be entered…)

At this point, the regular calls that Khatuna was holding proved invaluable - sharing knowledge across projects, getting advice on collection problems and more. As you’d expect, some cultures are more open to people collecting information than others - the cross-fertilisation of ideas can be extremely helpful. Bumps in the road are easier to deal with when you talk to someone who’s already further down the road!

So - 26-28 January 2016 finds us back in Istanbul learning about how to explore the data, come up with insights, change people’s perceptions, design and monitor the next interventions.

At this point, we’ve worked with smart, inspiring colleagues in Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Yemen, Serbia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Turkey, Zambia, Peru and Ecuador. And the plan is to write up papers on the experiences - and more. Watch this space...

Tuesday, 07 July 2015

This week I'm in Singapore at the International Risk and Horizon Scanning Symposium - working with governments to connect Foresight, Policy and Practice. Sometimes that's about increasing scanning capacity to help with strategic shock, sometimes it's about looking at underlying trends. We're running some live experiments - if you're reading this on 7th/8th July join in now with one at:

Over the past few weeks the Cognitive Edge team have also been running a new approach with the Singapore government called CrowdSensor. They've been collecting micro-scenarios (what people think might happen) on various topics. The sites and the issues are still open for the next few weeks - join in at the following addresses:

I've got some time to meet up in Singapore (Friday 10th July, Wednesday 15th July) and Melbourne (Wednesday 22nd July). And I'll probably be in Kuala Lumpur in mid-late August - so drop me a note (but expect a reply from my colleague Lisa!)

Friday, 03 July 2015

The National Health Service in Northern Ireland are among the earliest users of SenseMaker®, working with network member Anne McMurray to explore multiple health-focussed issues. Early examples included work around bereavement in families, allowing local teams to improve and adapt the support they provide - a report from that project is here.

Most recently, the excellent 10,000 Voices programme has been gathering thousands of patient experiences from the region - and it was recognised by Sir Liam Donaldson, the ex-Chief Medical Officer for the UK, in his recent report into the state of healthcare in Northern Ireland. Here's what he said:

At the heart of the traditional approach to assessing whether a service is responsive to its patients and the public are surveys of patient experience and attitudes. This is still a very important part of modern health and social care. In many major centres whose services are highly rated, such surveys are regularly carried out and used to judge performance at the organisational, service and individual practitioner level, as well as, in some cases, being linked to financial incentives. Indeed, in the United States system, observers say that it was not until surveys of patient experience were linked to dollars that it was taken seriously. This is not a prominent feature of the Northern Ireland system,although there is some very good practice, for example the 10,000 Voices initiative, which has so far drawn on the experience of over 6,000 patients and led to new pathways of care in pain management, caring for children in Emergency Departments, and generally focusing on the areas of dignity and respect.

And in his final recommendations:

Northern Ireland has done some good work in the field of patient engagement, in particular the requirement to involve patients and families in Serious Adverse Incident investigation, the 10,000 voices initiative, in the field of mental health and in many aspects of social care.

It illustrates how SenseMaker® is helping delve into some of the more difficult areas of healthcare in ways that raise important issues and allow them to be addressed - all improving both patient experience and outcomes.

Kudos to Christine Armstrong and her team for running such an acclaimed programme. I'm looking forward to visiting in October to train up the next generation of SenseMaker® users...

Thursday, 14 May 2015

Cognitive Edge and UNDP are together launching a unique initiative to engage with new ways of working on difficult problems in complex and fast-changing situations. The programme will last six months and a limited number of participants are being invited from across a variety of NGO and government groups.

The new Fragments of Impact initiative will explore the boundaries of using Cognitive Edge’s SenseMaker® software to work on intractable problems in uncertain, culturally-specific environments. The initiative is focused on:

generating fast feedback loops

capturing data on subtle changes in attitudes, behaviors and perceptions

bringing user-centered design methods to development work,

implementing projects with the realities of politics and power in mind

taking small bets and low-cost prototypes before committing large investments into multi year projects

Partnering with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Istanbul and building on a wide variety of projects with UNDP, GirlHub, IFAD, PRIME and others, participants will have extraordinary access to software, experts and a training programme, all while supporting current project implementation and attitude monitoring.

The initiative will support participants’ current projects - improving local understanding and programme effectiveness - as well as developing innovative skills and capacity, including how to redesign project initiatives to reflect perception data coming from the field.

The programme starts with a two-day project definition seminar in Istanbul on 22nd-23rd June 2015.

Why join the programme?

In recent years, Cognitive Edge and its network of associates have worked in a diverse range of environments on issues such as nutrition, climate change, conflict resolution, culture and girl power - helping implementers and decision-makers to understand the environment, as well as the potential pathways of improvement. In some cases, that has expanded to monitoring and evaluating improvements over time.

Working in fast-changing, highly-specific local contexts is at the core of most NGOs and development organisations. In those situations, operating is difficult enough, but two elements become critical:

Understanding the initial situation

Monitoring for shifts in attitudes and perceptions

The programme

Fragments of Impact has three distinct phases:

Phase 1: Education and project building

The initiative starts on 22nd-23rd June 2015 with a two-day seminar in Istanbul, hosted by the United Nations Development Programme for Europe and Central Asia, covering:

Principles of complexity, micro-narrative research and SenseMaker®-based approaches

Field examples of SenseMaker® projects to date

Collaborative project design

Alternative routes for data collection

Collaborative framework design

Following the event, Cognitive Edge and UNDP will design and build a small number of frameworks for web and app-based data collection by participants in the ensuing months. These frameworks will cover all core concepts that participants have agreed. Additional customisation of frameworks is available at an extra cost (see below).

Phase 2: Project implementation and data collection

For the data collection phase of the project - running from July 2015 to January 2016, Cognitive Edge and UNDP will be holding fortnightly mentoring conference calls for participants and providing basic monitoring of incoming data. This is a critical aspect of the initiative and can require new approaches from project teams, so our mentoring is to help teams think through and implement a strategy for data collection - both continuous and snapshot.

Participants will be expected to contribute to at least one of the data collection projects, but may contribute to as many as are relevant for their work.

Phase 3: Analysis, sense-making and conclusions

In January 2016, a second two-day seminar will be held. This seminar will teach and mentor participants in using analysis tools on the narrative data collected, coach methods to develop evidence-based interventions and pull together conclusions and examples from the overall programme.

Working together with evaluation experts, we plan to write up results and produce papers based on participants’ experiences of SenseMaker® use.

This is an opportunity to become a leading user of SenseMaker® and Cognitive Edge methods as part of a raft of projects - benefiting from shared knowledge and experience, economies of scale and mentoring from Cognitive Edge associates unavailable in normal projects. The initiative will bring together past practice with current theory and be an opportunity to develop practice-based examples of where SenseMaker® and Cognitive Edge methods can enhance current methods. The end result of this programme will be written up and published for public scrutiny.

The cost (per project)

Cost: $3,500 includes

The project cost represents great value - it covers the following:

Framework building and app/website production (usually $5,000)

Monthly software licences for the six months of the project (usually $2,400)

Mentoring (starts at $1,000 per month)

4 days of training on complexity, research and more (usually $4,300)

Academic input to the frameworks

Analysis and monitoring of the project

Participants will be need to fund their own travel and accommodation costs to the June 2015 and January 2016 seminars. Costs are per project, and participant projects are encouraged to send 2-5 team members.

Monday, 13 April 2015

In December 2012, I flew to Bratislava with Dave Snowden where we met with a roomful of smart, enthusiastic UNDPers (led by the redoubtable Milica Begovic) for a two-day event based around SenseMaker®. In two days, we moved from an introduction to narrative and self-signification to identifying half a dozen projects and then to developing frameworks. By the end of the second day, we had frameworks ready for testing and translation.

In the following months, projects moved at different paces and in different ways - a couple falling by the wayside, other succeeding beyond all expectations. And in May 2013 I was back in Bratislava with UNDP and Millie for another two days to teach how to use the SenseMaker® Explorer software and - after a suitable amount of overnight homework - review people's data and conclusions.

We've subsequently done more projects with UNDP - and are gearing up for more in the coming months. It's been an exciting series of projects - the benefit of having multiple projects running at the same time has been that the occasional failures (which are inevitable, if we're pushing the boundaries) haven't invalidated the whole process, but allowed us all to learn more about how projects work (or not) in different contexts.

The various teams have also been blogging regularly over the whole period. If you're interested in learning from people who have been applying micro-narratives, self-signification, SenseMaker® and collection to real-world problems, look no further.

I am, of course, fabulously biased here - I was involved in the inception of many of these projects and am lucky enough to call the people running them friends. But if you're looking for lessons/benefits/pain points of running a SenseMaker® project - I'd strongly recommend looking here first.

Monday, 30 March 2015

As promised, here are the slides from last week's presentation at the Partnership for Peace base in Ankara. The usual caveats apply - I'm not sure how much sense these make without my discussion over the top...